During a 'where' trial, the child should look longer at the named object. .... Flower. Where. Apple. Where's the Flower? Flower. Input. Comprehension. Visit.
Maternal Input Predicts Wh-Question Comprehension in Young Children with Autism Anthony Goodwin, Janina Piotroski, Gul Jaffery, Deborah Fein and Letitia Naigles Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut ABSTRACT Wh-question development was investigated in 15 children with autism. Participants were visited every four months during a three-year period. At each visit, mothers and children participated in a semi-structured play session, which was transcribed and coded for various linguistic features. At visits 3 through 6, children watched wh-question videos (Seidl et al., 2003) in an Intermodal Preferential Looking paradigm, to assess their comprehension of subject- and object- wh-questions. Maternal input measures at visits 1-2 were correlated with children’s comprehension measures from visits 3-6. Several input factors predicted later wh-question comprehension.
INTRODUCTION Most research on wh-question acquisition has investigated typically developing children’s production, often focusing on subject-auxiliary inversion (Ambridge, Rowland, Theakston & Tomasello, 2006). Much of this work examines how specific input predicts specific production outcomes (e.g., if “what does” is more frequent in the input than “what can”, children will acquire the former earlier than the latter; Rowland & Pine, 2000). Recent studies have reported that variation in maternal linguistic input correlates significantly with variation in subsequent speech production (word use, MLU) of children with autism (Swensen, Fein & Naigles, submitted). No research has investigated how maternal input might influence later comprehension of wh-questions. Furthermore, there has been no research on how input might predict the acquisition of more general aspects of language, such as grammatical movement (i.e., a wh-word moves to the front of the sentence, to form a wh-question such as “What did I find?”). The current research investigates whether significant relationships might be found between features of maternal input and children’s subsequent comprehension of subject and object wh-questions. Objectives: We evaluated wh-question comprehension using Intermodal Preferential Looking and analyzed transcripts of mother-child play sessions to determine which features of the mother’s speech were associated with children’s degree of wh-question comprehension.
METHOD
V1 32.86 27 80.67 77.07 74.93 81.53
V2 37.15 36 80.67 76.47 76.73 81.33
METHOD (continued)
RESULTS (continued)
Type Left Video Audio Right Video Control Apple They're on both screens! Flower Familiarization Apple hits Flower Look at this! Blank Familiarization Blank See this? Apple hits Flower Object-Wh Apple What did the Apple hit? Flower Subject-Wh Apple What hit the Flower? Flower *
Where Where
*
*
Apple Apple
*
*
*
Where's the Apple? Where's the Flower?
Flower Flower
Many of the sentence types that yielded significant correlations overlapped (e.g., Predicate Nominatives and Wh-Qs with BE). Therefore, a series of hierarchical regressions allowed us to select only those features that contribute a significant amount of unique variance. Does variation in maternal input at Visits 1 and 2 predict child comprehension at Visits 3 through 6? -YES!
*The entire layout was repeated with a second set of items.
Input
Comprehension measure: Where – What During a ‘where’ trial, the child should look longer at the named object. During a ‘what’ trial, the child should look less at the named object (and more at the unnamed object). Comprehension = Where (named) – What (named), should be positive. Maternal speech coding: Wh-questions produced by mothers during motherchild play were extracted from the transcripts and parsed for a variety of measures, including: Question type Subject Object Where Predicate Nominative Other
Examples Who___ chases a toy mouse? What does he have___? Where’s the wash cloth? What is this? What’s that one? How do you open this one?
Feature
Examples
Complex question
Where do you think they’re going?
Aux Contracted
What’s Clifford doing?
Aux Inversion
What do you think? What’s in here? Where are they?
BE, not PN
V3 41.06 45 82.67 75.60 76.87 84.20
V4 45.29 35 83.20 75.53 75.73 82.80
V5 49.59 40 79.63 73.69 75.63 83.06
V6 53.89 48 82.75 73.50 73.19 82.63
Number of children who Subject Wh-Questions comprehended at each visit: Object Wh-Questions
During each visit, children saw a series of Intermodal Preferential Looking (IPL) videos and participated in a 30-minute mother-child play session, which were video recorded and transcribed. Stimuli and Apparatus: The Wh-Q video (Seidl et al., 2003) was shown at Visit 3 through Visit 6. Children viewed side-by-side videos, paired with a single audio that matched only one video. Children’s eye movements were filmed and later coded.
Wh-Q test trial
Typically developing children comprehend subject and object wh-questions by 27 months of age (Goodwin et al., 2009; Seidl et al, 2003). Our participants with ASD did not show comprehension, as a group, until 54 months of age (Visit 6). However, there was variation between participants. V3 10 10
V4 9 9
V5 9 9
V6 10 10
Maternal input measures from visits 1 and 2 were correlated with children’s comprehension measures from visits 3 through 6. The features that were still significantly correlated after controlling for mothers’ MLU and children’s CDI scores are presented below. Input Feature More Verb Variety More Predicate Nominative questions More Object Wh-Qs More Question Types More ‘Where’ questions More Inverted Auxiliaries More Wh-Qs with BE as the main verb More Wh-Qs overall
r 0.667 -0.647 -0.611 -0.601 -0.577 -0.575 -0.565 -0.556
p 0.013 0.023 0.035 0.039 0.049 0.040 0.044 0.049
Comprehension
Visit
Feature
Visit
B
SE
b
p
1
Non-PN BE
3
-1.07
0.33
-0.64
0.008
2
# of Wh-Qs total
3
-0.44
0.14
-0.71
0.010
1
# PN questions
4
-1.23
0.22
-0.98
